The ability to monitor, track, and predict geopolitical events, including civil unrest, mass uprisings, revolutions, coups, the outbreak of war or military conflict, a change in political regimes, impending terrorism, assassination attempts, hijackings, kidnappings, labor disruptions, organized violence, and other forms of geopolitical instability, is useful to make informed decisions when acting in the international arena and protecting the domestic homeland, as well as in managing risk and identifying economic opportunities.
While monitoring, tracking, and predicting geopolitical events is desirable, doing so in an early-warning manner to provide anticipatory and actionable intelligence is a challenge due to the volume of relevant data to be analyzed and the often secret or obfuscated nature of primary sources of data. Moreover, extracting geopolitical knowledge from secondary data sources, such as those representing the wisdom of crowds as measured by their collective online behavior, poses a significant data management, as well as challenging computational, problem when attempting to model such online behavior.